Passion: Numbers

Passion: Numbers

Blossom Dearie sings about that great integer eight; Robert Kaplan wrote aboutThe Nothing That is: the History of Zero. We’re talking about the magic of numbers. They are transcendental and irrational, even imaginary numbers are real. We punch them and crunch them– integrate and differentiate them. Pick the lucky ones you win millions, the wrong ones and you’re the odd man out. the passion for numbers is the next installment in our Passion Thursdays series.

Bob Dorough

You know Bob Dorough. He’s a lgendary hipster jazz pianist, known to an entire generation as the brains behind the Multiplication Rock hits: My Hero Zero, Naughty Number Nine, and Three is a Magic Number. He’ll be joining us from Albuquerque, NM.

Jay Keyser

In our studios in Allston , MA we are thrilled to be joined by Jay Keyser. He’s Professor of Linguistics; Special Assistant to the Provost; Peter de Florez Chair; Phonology, Lexical Theory, Poetics at MIT.

Fantastic Fran

Last but not least, joining us from Detroit, MI is numerologist Fantastic Fran. She’s been using numbers for over a decade to help people sort out their past, present and future.

Related Content

Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)
Imagine changing this [johnlemon / Flickr]
We’re ringing in the New Year on a note of optimism with help from the eco-friendly encyclopedia Worldchanging: A User’s Guide For...

not including transcendental ones (I guess they didn’t cover those on Sesame St).

rpinnel

You need to speak with John Derbyshire, author of PRIME OBSESSION about the Riemann Hypothesis. He does this great song about the Riemann Hypothesis and Prime Numbers. You can hear some of it at: http://www.olimu.com/Riemann/Song.htm.

I can tell you how to reach him if you’re interested.

http://www.dalekeiger.com dkeiger

Don’t forget pi. Richard Preston, several years ago for The New Yorker, wrote a great profile of the Chudnovsky brothers, emigre Russian mathematicians who built their own supercomputer in a New York apartment, out of off-the-shelf parts. They built the computer so they could run pi out to hundreds of millions of digits. Perhaps the Chudnovskys could be part of your program.

mhs

John Conway’s Game of Life might fit well into this discussion. The simple rules of this mathematical “game” generate complicated patterns. I’m sure many find this property of the game to be thought-provoking.

http://blog.ragingbender.com/ Carl

I remember a raccous debate breaking out in one of my college classes surrounding the recurrance of “special numbers” (like ‘e’) throughout different types of science.

I am of the mind that this recurrence expresses our relationship to science rather than expressing something fundamental about the universe. Just a there are multiple geometries that are able to describe the universe, there must be alternative forms of the science that we know that would have other values recur or that would not have recurring values at all. It’s a hard idea to wrap one’s head around, but I’m sure there’s someone out there who studies alternate sciences (chemistry without atoms, physics without gravity, etc)

http://www.circles-salon.com allison

dkeiger – are the Chudnovsky brothers the inspiration for the movie “Pi”. I loved that film.

Also, “GÃ¶del, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid” was book that my father leant to me when I was in my early 20s. We both loved it and it gave me an appreciation for how numbers represented a particular kind of brain functioning that could be seen across disciplines. Not every artist is mathematical, but many are in varying degrees.

Now I want to read the book again. Maybe we should have a radio open source book club and dedicate one show a month to an intellectually stimulating book….

bart

Don’t forget – there are 10 kinds of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don’t.

ptrig

Elizabeth Sharp who goes by the monicker Ill Ease did a photobook inspired by the O.J. Simpson case entitled Tragic Rise and Fall of the Number 32. You can see some of it here: http://www.illease.com/photobooks/index.html

There are a lot of things to be passionate about when it comes to numbers, but numerology and other pseudoscience notions don’t number among them. A numerologist might be appropriate for a show on crackpots, crazy beliefs, self-deception, etc, but not in a serious discussion on numbers and humanity’s fascination with them. Fight the spread of dis- and mis-information!

Vanessa

chimpanzees can remember the sequence of at least 5 numbers, the same as (or even more than) preschool children. Our study and others demonstrate the rudimentary form of numerical competence in non-human primates.

Allison, I too loved the movie “Pi,” but it has nothing to do with the Chudnovsky brothers. If you’re not familiar with Richard Preston’s story in The New Yorker, send me your e-mail address and I’ll send a PDF of the piece.

Dale

Ken_L

I finally got around to listening to the show. Good show!

I’ve got a WebMathematica page that illustrates how the golden mean is related to the distribution of seeds on a flower: